Waze Data in Smartphones

Written by Amber Schroader

August 17, 2021

According to Wikipedia Waze is:

Waze is a GPS navigation software app and a subsidiary of Google. It works on smartphones and tablet computers that have GPS support. It provides turn-by-turn navigation information and user-submitted travel times and route details while downloading location-dependent information over a mobile telephone network.

So, like many people you have probably used Waze at one point or another thinking, it will get us to our destination faster or be less annoying than another mapping app. What you might not know about this helpful app for directions is the amount of data it retains that can be used for forensic evidence.

There are two main areas we look at when taking apart the Waze App for evidence. It comes down to location, location, location.

Location Data

In this part of the App you can receive the following data

Name

Street

House

City

State

Country

Coordinates (Latitude and Longitude)

ID

When you parse this data not all of it will be full and available, but as you can see a good percentage does bring about some good evidence.

Recent Data

This area can yield similar results with the following data available.

Access Time

Name

Coordinate (Latitude and Longitude)

Creation Time

ID

To make the discovery of this data easy the E3 Platform provides this information in the parsed Apps area as well as in the Mobile Data Triage. Many times, where a suspect is at the time of a potential incident can be critical in an investigation and still somewhat difficult to prove. Working with data from Apps like Waze make this process just a little bit easier.

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